Four short links: 18 July 2018

Program Synthesis in 2018 -- this is a readable and deeply informative guide to the state of the art in program synthesis (generating programs from specifications). I'm highly interested in this field, as it's a possible future of programming, and when advances are made in useful areas, it will be highly disruptive.

Lights Out: Climate Change Risk to Internet Infrastructure -- We align the data formats and assess risks in terms of the amount and type of infrastructure that will be under water in different time intervals over the next 100 years. We find that 4,067 miles of fiber conduit will be under water and 1,101 nodes (e.g., points of presence and colocation centers) will be surrounded by water in the next 15 years. We further quantify the risks of sea level rise by defining a metric that considers the combination of geographic scope and internet infrastructure density. We use this metric to examine different regions and find that the New York, Miami, and Seattle metropolitan areas are at highest risk.

Getting to Go: Memory Management and Garbage Collection -- The Go language features, goals, and use cases have forced us to rethink the entire garbage collection stack and have led us to a surprising place. The journey has been exhilarating. This talk describes our journey. Detailed and for a technical audience.

Nat Torkington has been active in web development since the early days of the web. He wrote the bestselling Perl Cookbook, and chaired conferences for O'Reilly Media for a decade. During his time at O'Reilly Media, Nat was an editor and then became a trend-spotter for the O'Reilly Radar group, identifying the topics to build events and books around. He has worked in areas as diverse as networking, publishing, science, edtech, and NLP. He now lives in New Zealand, where he runs Kiwi Foo Camp and helps startups grow.